PRIVATE SEARCH ENGINES STARTPAGE AND IXQUICK BREAK NEW RECORD WITH 4 MILLION DAILY SEARCHES

Race to find private Internet alternatives shows no signs of slowing down

July 3, 2013

NEW YORK: Traffic at the private search engines StartPage and Ixquick continues to grow at an explosive rate, as Web users flock to private alternatives in the post-PRISM Internet. Combined, the two search engines served well over 4 million direct private searches on Monday, shattering their earlier record of 3 million searches set less than three weeks ago.

"People are making major changes in their on-line habits and looking for ways to protect their private information from US government surveillance," said CEO Robert Beens. "Since we don't store IP addresses or use tracking cookies, we've offered powerful privacy protection to our users since 2006. Our fans especially appreciate the fact that we are a Dutch company, which means we are not directly subject to the US Patriot Act. And of course, we have never participated in any program like PRISM."

StartPage and Ixquick call themselves "the world's most private search engines" due to powerful features that protect users' privacy. StartPage offers Google results in total privacy and Ixquick provides equally private meta-search results from other providers. StartPage and Ixquick are the only search engines in the world to be independently certified for privacy through a stringent third-party audit process. Neither service stores any user data, and the company has never turned over information to any government entity in the US or elsewhere.

In addition, both StartPage and Ixquick offer a unique proxy service that not only allows users to search privately, but lets them also view the pages they find in complete anonymity. More details can be found in the company's overview video: Watch the Proxy video.

"StartPage and Ixquick have been ahead of the privacy curve for years," said Beens. "We were the first search engine to focus on privacy, and it has been our key value proposition since 2006. We pioneered the use of default SSL (HTTPS) encrypted connections, and we encrypt every search we run. Of course, not only does encryption stop hackers, it also offers powerful protection against government eavesdropping."

To complement its search products, the company will be introducing StartMail, a private, subscription-based email platform with strong encryption, later this year. Already, more than 45,000 people have signed up as beta testers to gain early access to the program on its release. (Interested parties can sign up at www.Startmail.com.)

"It's an exciting time to be working on privacy," says Harvard-trained privacy expert Dr. Katherine Albrecht, who helped develop StartPage and StartMail. "We are the first and largest private search engine. US jurisdiction does not directly apply to us, and we offer our users verifiable trust. That's why we are earning the confidence of growing numbers of privacy-conscious individuals and organizations around the globe."